revolt of the neurons 1.docx
TRANSCRIPT
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Revoltof the Neurons
Jack Galmitz
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Revolt of the Neurons
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Jack Galmitz
Revolt of the Neurons
Copyright © 2013 Jack Galmitz
ImPress
N.Y., N.Y.
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Revolt of the Neurons
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Third Day
It was the third day of my topography course. We had handed in our first
assignment- a route from the school to our homes. I had not left time
enough to do a proper job, so I downloaded from Google Earth the area
and used a ruler to draw a straight line between the two points.
The professor decided to make a lesson from my laxity. He mentioned myname, projected my plan, and asked me to explain the dynamics. I told the
class that when I reached a group of assembled buildings, I flew over them
to the marshland on the other side. From there I tied some broken
branches together with rope I had with me, shaved down a piece of wood
for an oar, and paddled to the other side. From there, I crawled in an
exposed underground pipe to my neighborhood and after that I was home
free.
“Do you expect us to believe that?” asked the professor.
“Well, I certainly hope not,” I replied. “You’d have to stretch you credulity a
bit much.”
“So explain how your route actually works.”
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I explained that I hailed a cab and the driver was a Sikh. He had
transcended physical reality. He carried me on his back and in the ether we
were at my home in minutes. The class laughed. The professor frowned.
“Are you mocking me?” he asked.
No, sir. It’s a well-known fact that devotees often travel through other
realms. It was mere serendipity that I found one that night.
The Last
I was panicking. I couldn’t find the final writing assignment for an English
course. It is vague whether it was one question or a series of questions, but
I had about four or five notebooks and I couldn’t find what I had written. I
had just written something on golf and was about to discuss the equipmentas the next paragraph of the developing theme.
I desperately looked from one notebook to another. Not only could I not
find it, but I couldn’t find anything I had written for the assignment.
Everyone, including my professor, her husband, also a professor, and others
on their way to schools to begin their profession, were on my side, assuring
me it didn’t matter, as I already had the certification and degrees I needed
without passing the course. But, I was too methodical a personality to be
swayed.
There was this small impish young man I knew who was enjoying how
distraught I was. I forget his name, but he was puckish, tiny featured and
jumping around in joy at my loss. If I wasn’t so bent on finding what I had
written, I would have grabbed him and given him a beating.
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All I could say to my colleagues was maybe I was simply not academic
material. I explained to them that my writing was going well, there was no
doubt about it, but as to talking in the manner of a gentleman, knowing
references to all the writers over the centuries, well, I wasn’t very
convincing.
The factor of time was the terror. It had run out. They were only allowing
me to continue my useless hunt out of friendship.
And where had that puckish person gone? I had thought he took it. He was
nowhere to be found. The thought occurred to me that he had no place
there, so why had I seen him trollop about. Had I imagined him as an
excuse? No, I couldn’t be Puck, no way.
Two
I was one of conjoined twins. As we shared internal organs, we could not
be separated and had to live our life joined together. To make matters
worse, my parents had named my twin Harry and me Tim, as if we were
two ordinary kids on the block. Let me tell you, it’s not easy getting along
with a headstrong conjoined twin. Harry had a fixed idea about everything
and as it was we had to cooperate to do anything. We were awarded Social
Security Disability from the start, but as we grew older we had to
supplement our income in order to survive. As we each had one arm, we
had to work together. We decided to paste rhinestones on plated rings at a
ten cents a ring. We eventually mastered it- he put on the glue and I set it
in the ring.
We had separate brains and I have to admit he was the smarter. We soon
were making enough money from our venture to stay even with inflation.
Harold, against my will, applied to a college and with financial aid, we were
admitted. He studied math and science. I liked the arts. I was stuck listening
to lectures that tormented me with boredom, not to mention the hours
spent at a desk with him reading.
Oddly, Harold had a way with women. He had many girlfriends at school
and enjoyed sex in our bed. Since we each had our own brain and sexual
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organs, I felt no pleasure and was forced to endure the bucking of my body,
the moans, the screams of passion, the spastic brut art of orgasm.
Finally, I had had enough of it all and told him I was leaving. I chose our
clothes, and pulled him outside in my chosen direction. I brought him to
MOMA, bought some books on artists I admired and told him I wanted to
split. I knew for a fact that he had voted Republican down the line, which
was anathema to me, that he repeatedly told his psychiatrist how he hated
our parents, and how he despised my presence during his sexual bouts.
I pulled and pulled with all my strength to wrench free of him. He
snickered. I had to realize we were stuck with each other for life. I hated
him, but our bodies were essentially one and harming him would be
harming myself.
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Letter
To the Black Hole:
I’m afraid I don’t know who else to write to.
The fire is brightest where the sun holds its hands.
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Where I was born is a long way from here.
I’ll never get back there.
A baritone voice booms in a language I don’t speak.
Is home everywhere. It cannot be. It’s a mass or
a revel of forest dwellers worshipping death.
I’m not prejudiced. I sing along. Help me.
The chorus gets louder and the trees tremble,
drop their leaves, pull up their roots, and run like deer.
I run with them. I fall in quicksand. I sink. I’m being
pulled in. When only my head is above the murk
I begin to see I never did exist. It was a twist,
my brain, the revolt of neurons.
All the same help me. Help me.
Nothing else is.
The Change
She swam her laps the length of the pool, alternating between the crawl,
the breaststroke, the backstroke, the sidestroke. She wore a white bikini
and it reflected the sun even in the crystalline water, so that you could see
the arrow of her perfect body as it whizzed forward. In her turns, her head
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emerged, black hair, pale face. She worked her whole body for nearly an
hour and then decided to climb out and rest.
When she was halfway up the ladder, she felt something different about
her ability to move. She looked and she was shocked. The lower part of
her body was that of a fish. She had become a mermaid. It was not
possible, she thought, but then she realized she had to find a way to
commandeer her way to her poolside lounge chair and cover her bottom
with a long terrycloth robe. She swam to the other side and slipped
through the people who were all so engaged in activity that they didn’t
notice her. With her robe on she felt safer, but still terrified.
She had to think and think quickly. Her husband was at a table playing high
stakes poker with some other men, and he didn’t once look over to whereshe was. She had to make it through the pool grounds, out to the parking
lot, and then into the bay, which fortuitously was at high tide.
She shimmied her way out without being noticed. She made it to the
parking lot, then the rocks, and then descended into the bay. Oddly, there
was she felt she was where she belonged for the first time in her life. She
swam under water at great speed with the ease of her large slapping tail
and reached the bluffs of an old army outpost. She surfaced and rested on
a rock. She would head to the ocean. Were there others like her, shewondered. Were there mermen in the sea, so she could have
companionship. She was not at all unhappy about leaving her past life. Her
husband was a narcissist and she had no children. If there were others of
her kind, would they turn out to be more communal than humans. As she
dove back in, she headed to the sea with trepidation and elation, things she
hadn’t felt for a very long time.
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Where
I couldn’t find my way home. Every day after work now it was the same
thing. The city (I supposed) had deconstructed the one train that left me a
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bus ride from my home. There were gaping holes and twisted, teetering
steel beams where before there had been a subway line.
Looking for an alternative route, I would constantly end up lost in another
borough. The trains looked different, from a different time, squatter, less
cars, with letters designated them I had never saw before. I would scream
to people inside and invariably they would say yes and once I hopped
aboard I soon found out I was only being led deeper into the wrong
borough.
The views from these elevated stations were spectacular, yet frightening.
There were monuments and buildings all built in the totalitarian style of the
1930s- huge, imposing, threatening buildings and sculptures that conveyed
the power of the regime. I had never seen these before and while intrigued,I felt what I was meant to feel- fear.
Then, I would go to the streets and there everyone just waited for taxis, all
gypsy taxis, just cars that charged to take people to their destinations.
There were no taxi stands, no hailing them, just impromptu appearances
and everyone waving and running to get in. There were also buses that
some people said would take us to where we wanted to go, but as they
approached those in the know would shake their heads and say no, that’s
not the right one.
I would always end up back in the bowels of the subway speaking to an
agent, who would suggest something, or tell me entry was forbidden
beyond his point and he would turn his back to me.
I don’t know what happened. I made it home, if at all, at late night hours,
fell immediately asleep to wake to a repetition of the same series of events.
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Upon a Time
She had tattoos of stars colored in luminous white on her breasts, along her
back, near her tailbone, around her belly and down.
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When we turned off the lights, she shone enough so that we could make
love under their light.
We were the nut and bolt that riveted held the universe up.
I was a stargazer, a star chaser, a star cataloguer.
She was shiny paper and I an inkjet.
We made art.
It was not for sale.
It was for life.
When people said I should keep my feet on the earth,
I thought they must walk on all fours.
What else is there but the silhouette of a woman
And the burning brilliance of the stars to clutch.
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A Laugh
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To make extra income for my family, particularly with the view of having
enough money to send our two children to college, I did work on weekends
as a party clown. I wore a loose silk body suit of white with large blue polka
dots, large floppy shoes, a red wild hair piece, red bulb of a nose, white
painted face, and naturally painted a gigantic black smile around my thinlips. I had studied how to make animals shapes out of balloons, and
otherwise I was present to pat the children on the head, clap my hands,
and sometimes do silly dances.
The money was not bad, but the abuse a clown takes from children and
their mothers is more than is usually reported. The mothers always want
more, the children like to step on your feet and try to pull on your nose
(which is glued to your real nose), and otherwise make enough noise to
break your inner ear drum.
After about a year of it, I had saved $15,000.00. However, it was
depressing me. There’s nothing quite as humiliating as being a clown.
Especially for a loan officer at an international bank.
One night I came home after a birthday party and when I pulled the wig off
it wouldn’t come free. It is rubber and hot inside and I thought it had just
formed suction to my nearly bald head. I decided to remove the nose, but
that also wouldn’t come free. I couldn’t remove the shoes or the suit. I satdown on the bed and began to panic inside. I waited a good while, tried to
wash off the white paint, but it was stuck to my face.
I had become a clown.
How was I going to go to the bank the next morning? Put on a gray suit,
white shirt, red tie, over a clown suit, with a red wig and bulbous nose and
white smiling face? I think I had overdone it. There was no way back. I
thought I’d have to run away and join a circus.
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Laughter
He asked his wife if she wanted to go dancing. “It’s ladies’ night, drinks for
women half price at one of the local bars.” “I don’t think so, darling. I’m
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not going dancing with a three-legged man. It’s too embarrassing.” “What
do you mean by that?” “You know very well. All you have to do is have a
passing sexual thought and it hangs down like a donkey’s in heat. Christ, it
nearly reaches the floor.”
“Well, that explains why I’ve always been an ass man,” he chuckled. She
fought back laughter and punched him a few times in his chest and then
cuddled her head there.
“Well, we can go miniature golfing,” he said. We can use my member as
the putter. “No way,” she burst out laughing. “We can play stickball,” he
said, “but you’ll have to stroke it so it’s hard enough to hit the rubber ball
with.” She remained silent.
“How about a movie. No one can see my extra leg there and you know how
you like buttered popcorn.” “What’s playing?” “A remake of King Kong.
Remember when you used to call me Kong?” “Very funny.”
“All right. Let’s watch the history channel on PBS. That always shrinks me
down to normal size.”
“Good idea,” she answered. And I’ll make us some popcorn.
“Afterwards we can make love,” he suggested. “That will do it for a while”
“Bray,” she answered.
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